Under the Covers

                                                    

Bill

Everyone needs a way to relate to people who are not part of their everyday lives and to experience places that are not a part of their ordinary existence. For a few there is travel. Actually see the Pyramids. Walk down into the Grand Canyon.  For a nine year-old kid living in Hyde Park in the 50s, this wasn’t an option.  My family took day trips and occasionally spent a week in a small cabin down along the ocean. New Hampshire was a destination when an uncle lived up in Seabrook.  One summer we spent an entire day at a park on the coast of Maine.  

Egypt and Arizona, though, were places I never expected to visit. Growing up my window on the world was through movies and books. Guided by images and words I was able to imagine the many places I’d never visit, was introduced to people I’d never meet (In some cases would never want to meet.) and allowed to do things I might never do.  Still, I needed a physical place to allow my imagination room to expand.  A safe place.  A quiet place.  In my situation, a dark place. A movie theatre is a good choice for some. But for me as a young kid that special place was in my bed under the covers.

My younger brother and I shared a room on the larger side of what most people would call the attic, the space under the roof.  My older brother had the smaller space on the other side of the attic.  When we moved to the house on Prospect Street, the upstairs was unfinished.  We had a wide plank floor put in by my father before we moved  but there were no walls, just the slant of the roof, and no ceiling, just the peak of the roof.  

A real room with all the walls and the ceiling and a nice hardwood floor would come later (See the blog entry A House Becomes a Home.) but I was fine with what we had in those early days. I just wanted a place to go, a bed to sleep in, a floor to play on, a window to look out of.  I had all of those upstairs.  I also had a place under the covers.

My bed was a single bed positioned so that one side of it was close to the slant of the roof.  We had insulation stapled between the rafters.  I soon realized the shiny aluminum part that faced the room was distinctly fragile.  Just about anything would tear it.  Throwing a ball around,  rough-housing, even rubber-tipped arrows could tear it.  So I often had bits of the inside batting falling on my bed; sometimes the aluminum would hang over my bed so that we had to tape it back up.  The problems with that insulation was a big factor in my father finally putting up a ceiling.

To get away from the insulation situation I’d pull my covers, or in the summer just the sheet, over my head.  With my knees up I’d form a little tent.  Not bad.  Kind of cozy.  My own little world under here.  I liked it.  But when the room light was turned off, “Time to go to sleep.” it was dark.  Then I’d reach out under my bed for the flashlight.

My father worked as an electrician at the power plant at the Navy Yard in South Boston. So the flashlights we had came from his work.  They were Navy issue, made of hard grey plastic in a water-proof housing.  Pretty indestructible.  My father also fixed people’s TV sets as a second job.  He often had one of those flashlights in hand as he looked in the back of a TV to figure out why there was no picture.  As you can imagine, we had no lack of flashlights in our house. I particularly liked the ones with which you could narrow or widen the beam of light.  Sometimes I’d prefer just the narrow beam.  It was brighter.  Other times, when I read, I’d twist the lens cover a half a turn for a wider beam.  Less bright but more light over a wider space.

Is there anything more fun to a kid than a flashlight?  It’s not a tool to us, it’s a toy. Under the covers, in the darkness, with just a flashlight, it was always interesting.  Welcome to shadowland.  There are my knees, and the shadows of my knees, elongated and spooky along the underside of the covers. I knew how to make a rabbit with three fingers.  Moving the flashlight back and forth, the rabbit skitters around in a panic down by my feet. I turn the flashlight rapidly on and off beginning to realize it takes my pupils a moment to adjust from the darkness to the brightness.

What would happen, I wonder, if I shine the flashlight directly into my eyes? Closing one eye, I put the flashlight right up to the open one.  All is bright yellow, then spots began to show up.  Uh, oh.  I quickly shut the flashlight off.  The spots continue.  They began to float around, coalescing in the corners of the darkness before beginning to fade away.  Uh, oh.  I like doing this.

I sometimes think that shining the light in my eyes and then settling back to enjoy the visual manifestations was akin to kids in the 60s and 70s who experimented with acid and other drugs.  Shining the flashlight in my eyes in this dark environment under the covers took me out of reality.  Did I have a need to be taken out of reality? An interesting question but I do know there was something about that dark, confined space that invited my initial exploration of sensory experiences.  

Sometimes I’d shine the light in both eyes and then shut them very tightly. Now I’m falling.  The whole bed is coming with me.  Down into some deeper darkness.  I quickly open my eyes.  I’m dizzy.  I snap the flashlight back on.  I do it again.  I feel like I’m moving out of my body.  The feelings are unique, and odd.  A return to reality is as simple as lifting the covers away from my face to let the cool room air flood over me.

A flashlight was more than a means to a sensory end.  It allowed me to read under the covers. And a flashlight was essential for View-Master, a toy stereoscope for looking at 3-D color pictures.  From such a modest little device, a black Bakelite apparatus with a slot at the top to load the View-Master reels and a lever on the side to advance from picture to picture, it was surprising how realistic those scenes looked.

I didn’t have many reels.  Back in the 50s they were mostly travel pictures, as View-master put it, “Seven more wonders of the world.”  For some reason all the reels I had were of the American West.  No matter.  They took me somewhere else.

In my bed, the covers tented over my head, the View-Master and reels beside me, I’m trying to position the flashlight so it will shine into the back of the View-master.  This was the tricky part since two hands were required for operation, one to hold the View-Master and one to advance the lever.  This left no hand to hold the flashlight.  It's a matter of laying it on your stomach or somehow holding it between your legs at just the right angle.

I never seemed to get tired of looking again and again at the few reels I had.  Scenes of the Painted Desert, of the Black Hills with the presidents carved in stone on Mount Rushmore, and dizzying views of the Royal Gorge in Colorado.  My favorite may have been one reel called Life with the Cowboys, Cattle Roundup and Branding, USA.  One scene in particular was especially vivid.  A cowboy holding a branding iron stands above a cow.  White smoke infuses the scene.  It was something I had never seen before.  Yes, poor cow, but I was more interested in the wispy smoke that permeated the picture. With the scene in vivid color and 3-D right in front of my eyes, I felt smoke drifting right into my bed. Virtual reality before its time. 

Reading under the covers required a different configuration for the flashlight.  Now I had to try to balance it on the pillow or on my shoulder in order to get it to shine on the pages of a book in front of me.  It meant every time I moved a little bit, adjusting the pillow, trying to get more comfortable, the flashlight would fall down onto the sheets.  I tried to read lying on my side but with my legs down the tent was down too.  It did get hot under there at times.  Then I’d throw the covers off quickly discovering I was not on a ship at sea or on a deserted island as described in the book I had balanced on my chest.  I’m just in my room. Often I’d fall asleep, both the book and the flashlight falling somewhere until I discovered them again in the morning.

The books I’d read included comic books (Yes, I know Gin.  They are not books!), library books and books my sister Mildred had when she was a kid. Mildred is the reason I read some of the Five Little Peppers series.  Yeah, there were five of them along with their widowed mother living in some impoverished New England town. It’s not a book I read much of.  It seemed old-fashioned, mannered.  I didn’t know then the books had been written in the 1880s and ‘90s.  I liked the kids though, especially the older ones. 

Another book I attempted, flashlight in hand, was one my father had given me for Christmas.  It was one of his favorites. He thought I would like it as well. Two Years Before the Mast is about a Harvard graduate, Richard Dana, who signs on as a sailor on a two-masted brig sailing from Boston harbor in the 1830s.  His voyage takes him around Cape Horn  to California.  I would read it on and off so that if my father asked me about it I’d have something to say. It did not have the same impact on me as it did on my father.  I think my father enjoyed the romance of it. I found Dana’s vivid descriptions of what it was like to be sea sick and still climb the rigging to set sails, and the vivid portrayal of the captain’s philosophy of violent discipline, unsettling.   I also had trouble with the nautical jargon. Or maybe it was just beyond the intellectual reach of a nine year-old.  I do remember the illustrations in the copy I had.  Clicking the flashlight on and off at a picture of the ship would make it leap about as if it were caught in a storm at sea.  It apparently did not take much to amuse me once I got tired of reading about the technical aspects of trimming sails, trying to remember the difference between fore and aft, and just what sea legs were. 

Reading magazines under the covers presented more problems.  Every once in a while I’d bring a Life magazine to read with my trusty flashlight.  It took a while to adjust to the larger size and flexibility of a magazine as opposed to a more rigid book or something more easily held like a comic book. That’s why I usually read magazines down on the couch in the living room and not upstairs in my bed. And by reading I mean quickly turning from page to page to find something that interested me.  Not the news in front, not the editorial, not the articles about Truman or Churchill. Sometimes it didn’t take me long to go through it. Once, though, reading Life magazine became something much more.  

I remember this moment in my life very well.  A lot of things came together to contribute to it. It was a few days after Christmas, 1954.  The Life that had come a few days earlier was the Christmas issue featuring a detail of a painting by Bruegel on the cover.  I didn’t expect much when I brought it up to my room, tucked myself under the covers, adjusted my flashlight and began reading. If there is  Christmas magic, then it was with me that night.

The flashlight is set up.  The Life magazine is balanced against my legs.  I open the issue. Right off there’s an ad for Ipana toothpaste.  We use Colgate but I like that word, Ipana.  I also notice everyone in toothpaste ads has the straightest, brightest teeth.  Most teeth I see in the real world are somewhat yellow and full of imperfections.

I glance through the Letters to the Editors section.  Everyone loves the stories in the previous issue except for those complaining about the stories in the previous issue or offering corrections to the stories in the previous issue.  I like that Life includes some of each.

Usually I skip through the magazine but tonight I’m finding many of the pages have something of interest.  Of course, it helps there are lots of pictures.

The first article details the Christmas efforts of the Salvation Army.  I live a few miles from downtown Boston but my world is trees and fields. Featuring pictures of people in New York and Chicago asking for donations on the cold dark streets, offering help to strangers, giving hope and counsel to the sick and needy, this article was the beginning of an understanding of the true meaning of Christmas, or at least a simplified idea of the concept.

Reality is everywhere in those first few pages, Christmas notwithstanding. There’s a two page spread, “Images of the Week Before Christmas”.  A plane crash into Jamaica Bay in New York, people rioting in Greece over the status of Cyprus, the trial of Dr Samuel Sheppard accused of killing his wife. There’s also a picture of a baby staring with awe at the family’s Christmas tree. There is an article on Vietnam where “Christian refugees from Communism” prepare to celebrate Christmas in a partitioned Indochina. Vietnam would haunt me and many other people for the next twenty years and here I am reading about it as a kid in the darkness of my bedclothes.  The past is the future and it’s always hovering about us.

There is an ad for V-8.  Who would drink a mixture of tomatoes, celery, carrots, spinach, lettuce, beets, watercress and parsley?  What are watercress and parsley anyway?  And how do you get juice out of celery and carrots?  That’s like getting juice out of a rock.  Looking back I can see that reading Life stimulated my intellect even if I did get some things wrong.

A much better ad was a two-page spread on the history of the tomato “from Columbus to Campbell”. I did not drink tomato juice or like tomato soup, or even eat tomatoes, but I liked this ad, especially the cartoon illustrations.  I learn the tomato is native to the Americas and was thought to be poisonous. My father loved tomatoes right from the garden.  He’d eat them like an apple.  I wonder if he knows that once they were considered poison.

There’s an article about a high school math class in Milwaukee collecting pennies.  They want to know what a million of them looks like.  Everyone collecting them looks like they are having fun.  Every girl is dressed exactly the same.  This is the age of conformity.  And the age when the military commanded respect.  I’m reading about “snowbound servicemen who guard the Arctic approaches to North America.” The Air Force has flown up gifts, Christmas trees and everything for a holiday dinner.  There are lots of other people in the world, I realize, and that’s where some of them are right now. Way up by the north pole. It looks so cold there.

I spend a long time with the article on the paintings by Bruegel.  Normally works of art by a 16th century Dutch painter would not be of much interest to me at that age.  Maybe the flashlight stabbing the darkness under the covers to reveal these subdued paintings featuring people and situations I can identify with have an effect.  

Perhaps it's the style of the layout to feature an entire painting and then pictures of details from that same painting.  First I look at the entire work not seeing all that much.  Then I realize the smaller pictures are from the same large painting. I begin to see where to look. 

In the Adoration of the Magi, at first I am just seeing throngs of people crowded around a shed trying for a glimpse of Mary and the infant Jesus. I don’t notice much else.  But one of the smaller pictures from the same scene shows an elephant.  I look back to the full painting and there, way up at the top, tiny and in the distance, is the elephant.  There is another insert picture of camels.  It takes me a few moments but there they are in the painting, on the right, difficult to discern since the brown of the camels is almost as one with the brown of the background. There is a detail of people hovering outside the shed. Some have gifts; one person has a monkey on his shoulder.  Their faces seem real to me, not angelic or stately, but like someone I might see down to Cleary Square.  In the way the magazine seeks to detail the main painting I am able to understand it more and to better visualize all its varied parts. I wonder if this works on comic book drawings.

Several details are also featured in another painting, Slaying of the Innocents, in which Spanish horsemen carry out an attack on people in a small village.  The original painting is crowded with detail: attackers, the crowds being attacked, confusion and chaos amidst the buildings in the distance. The detail pictures show me what to look for in the larger painting, details I don't see until my attention is led to them. In one particular scene in the lower left of the main painting, a horseman pushes his stallion into the path of a fleeing woman with a baby in her arms.  In the detail you see the look of fear and shock on the woman’s face. An excited dog bounds beside her.  I am shocked too, and fascinated.  I’m used to movies and TV, and yet here is a painting that is also telling a dramatic emotional story.  You just have to know where to look.

In the middle of the magazine was something I had never seen before.  A family Christmas project in the form of a 14-pointed star which you could remove from the magazine and then assemble.  “A star any family with a little patience can put together,” the article stated. I read further. You would need scissors, a single-edged razor blade, cellophane tape and a careful following of the instructions. 

I look at the two-dimensional star on which is printed letters and large plus signs. On the next page more of the star with double tipped arrows indicating where to join the pieces. Is any tetradecagon worth this much trouble I would have thought had I been real smart.  Instead I conclude my family is not one for projects that require all of us to be seated around a table especially with a razor blade nearby.  I turn the page.

That’s when I come upon what turns out to be my favorite part of this Christmas issue and is probably why I remember so well reading this particular issue of Life that many years ago.

It’s the story of The Swiss Family Robinson shipwrecked in the East Indies.  Along with a condensation of the text of the original, it’s illustrated with color drawings which have never been published before.

I settle back into the soft comfort of my pillow and am soon engrossed in this story.  I read every word and stare at every picture.  Why am I so taken by this tale written over a hundred years ago and not by the story of the sailor in Two Years Before the Mast?  Upsetting things happen to the Robinson family as happened to author Richard Dana. Attacks by animals, trying to find food, staying out of the fury of tropical storms. The big difference has to do with the kids, the children of the shipwrecked parents.  One of them, Jack, was about my age.  Notwithstanding their exotic situation, here are people I can identify with, their plight, their resourcefulness, their descriptions of this unique natural world.

The illustrations bring it all to life. One shows Jack discovering the bleached bones of an enormous creature lying up on a narrow beach.  The bones of a whale.  Another displays their tree house, a circular building high up in a most perfectly symmetrical tree.   Definitely fanciful but it dovetailed nicely with how I might imagine similar situations. 

Another aspect of life on the island includes the number of animals present.  Animals for meat and clothing, animals for domestic use, animals for the kids to play with.  Bears, elephants, kangaroos, leopards, monkeys, walrus, parakeets, koalas, horses and more.  I know now this was an impossible array of creatures to be confined and surviving on a tropical island.  Reading it then,  it enhanced the family’s adventures in ways both plausible and appealing. What kid wouldn’t want to ride on the back of an ostrich?

I turn from page to page, read the text, stare at the pictures, reluctantly moving on to the next page knowing I’ll soon run out of pages. The story is over.  Some of the family end up in England; others elect to stay in paradise. I’d like to stay there with them.  I’m a bit sad.  I need something to cheer me up.

Life always had a humorous photo on the last page of every issue. The Miscellany.  So I end my absorbing read of this week’s Life looking at a picture of two Santa Clauses walking together up the stairs of a subway station.  They are volunteers on their way to solicit funds for the poor on the streets of New York.  As the caption says, “a disquieting moment.” I’m not sure I get why it's described as “disquieting”.  Maybe it’s the fact there are two Santa Clauses together.  I thought there was only one.  And Santas should be riding sleighs pulled by reindeer.  And where is the snow?  I guess it is disquieting.  And not the laugh I was looking for either.

I slide the magazine under my bed, snap off the flashlight, and pull the covers up to my chin.  It’s cold out on this winter’s night but I am relaxed and cozy.  I think of the Robinson family and how they might have celebrated Christmas on their new island home. I’ll have to get the book from the library to find out.
  

I lie there a while, my eyes open.  I get used to the dark.  I begin to see the outline of my room.  Christmas is over.  School isn’t back until next week.  There's still New Year’s to celebrate. In a few days, 1954, like the Robinson’s adventure, will come to an end. People will celebrate, wear funny hats, drink a lot, blow into those paper noise makers, kiss people they would not normally kiss, scream Happy New Year at midnight. 

I turn over on my side. I begin to think about that future most people feel is worth celebrating. Next year, the new one, 1955, I’ll turn ten.  The same age my sister was when I was born.  She has a boyfriend.  Maybe she’ll get married.  Will I ever be married?  I’m not sure what being married even is. Who would take care of me, I wonder, if I were married?  I put it out of my head.  I’d rather be shipwrecked with the Swiss Family Robinson. I begin to drift off.  The Robinsons are celebrating a wedding. It’s loud and chaotic, a scene from the 16th century.  Off in the distance, lit by the slender rays of the moon, are the bleached bones…of a young boy.  I start awake!  The flashlight which I had carelessly left on the edge of my mattress has fallen onto the floor.  It doesn’t matter.  It’ll be there on the floor, just where it fell, when I get up in the morning.